BloggingNotes.net

100 Posts For Blogging Notes

Rod — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 13:30:16 +0000

While it may not be the greatest of achievements, I’m happy to say that this is the 100th post that has gone live here on BloggingNotes.net. Back when the site launched last November, and for the first month or two, I thought I’d be hitting 100 posts before Valentine’s Day. And if I’d been able to keep up the pace, I probably would have.

But, things changed a little, and now that I’m blogging more regularly again, I can continue working towards the goals that I have for the site, with regards to comments, and subscribers. I’m still making very little money off of the site, but I’ve come to accept that. Unless someone wants to drop some money to advertise on the site, Adsense just ain’t gonna do it. And I’m all right with that. (But if someone DOES want to drop some advertising money on the site….let’s talk)

I don’t think know that BloggingNotes wouldn’t have had the early success that it did without the help of BloggingZoom. The amount of traffic and stumbles that came via BZ just made me shake my head each day as I watched the numbers climb. Court and Vic created something very special in BZ - something that can help bloggers more than they realize.

Over the course of the last 100 posts, some that I thought would bring large amounts of traffic did absolutely nothing, and some filler posts turned into monsters. Go figure. Obviously not everything I write is going to turn into a huge post, but it sure opened my eyes to the kinds of things that can bring traffic in.

Some of my best (and favourite) posts, include:

I Won’t Read Your Post if the Title Sucks - this was the first post that I think I submitted to BZ, and it taught me that titles can be everything when it comes to readership. This one garnered great comments on the BZ site from both Court and Griz.
Write for Your 1000 Readers - I think that this post showed me just how much traffic StumbleUpon could actually bring in. Huge numbers came in for this post, and to this day it still shows up in the logs as having been stumbled.
Posting Crap Is More Harmful Than Posting Nothing - I believed it then, and I believe it now.
I Found Another Site to Stay Away From - Man, did this one touch off a firestorm. One of the most heavily commented posts on the site.

Those are some of my favourite posts over the last 8 months or so that I’ve been doing this. It hasn’t always been easy, and there’s certainly been some unintended breaks in the action, but without the support of the readers and subscribers, there wouldn’t be much point to doing this, would there? Thank you.

A little while ago, I mentioned that I had an announcement to make regarding the site. It’s not finalized, but I’ll make it here anyway. The owner of bloggingnotes.com has offered to let me use the domain in addition to bloggingnotes.net, so in the next little while (hopefully by the end of the month), you’ll be able to use either URL to point to the same content. All of the original content that was on bloggingnotes.com will still be available, at archive.bloggingnotes.com as well.

Once again, thanks very much for staying subscribed to the blog, and for all of the comments that everyone has made. It sure has made this ride a lot more enjoyable.

Cheers,
Rod

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Domain Transfers Can Be Hell

Rod — Sat, 31 May 2008 00:25:02 +0000

The other day I made the decision to move a domain from one registrar (about $17/year) to GoDaddy (for a fair bit less), and started the procedure to get things rolling.

After I had gotten everything squared away with GoDaddy, they told me that I would need to login to my account on the original registrar and confirm that I actually wanted to move the domain. I did so, and found nowhere on their site details on how to confirm moving a domain away from them to a new registrar. *Lots* of information on how to move one to them, but not the opposite. Sent them an email about it, and finally got a response today with a link to confirm the transfer.

After that, I confirmed that everything appeared to be running smoothly, and that the domain was responding correctly, which it was.

When I got home tonight, though, I found that GoDaddy had changed the DNS records, and the domain is now pointing to a GoDaddy landing page full of ads. Oh, crap.

Then I realized that I’d make a mistake that Vic had talked about earlier - *NEVER* have the contact email for your account be the same as the domain in which it’s registered. When they changed the DNS records, I suddenly lost access to my email for that domain. And I happen to store my account number in that inbox. Not the brightest thing to do, I know, but…

So now, the domain is dead until at least Monday when I get back to work and login to my account from there. Because to have them email me the login, I’d have to have access to the email account that they changed the DNS records for.

Fun, huh?

I think that when I get things straightened out, I’m going to be moving the mail to Google Apps for Domains, and changing the contact email on *all* my domains to my standard Gmail address. Because this has turned in to a bigger pain than I could have imagined.

I’m just glad it was on a personal domain. If it had been on one that I made money on, I’d be seriously P.O.’d.

Moral of the story is, change the contact email on your domains to something that’s not related to the domain, and if something goes very wrong, at least you’ll be able to receive mail from the registrar if necessary.

Update: Well, I logged in to the GoDaddy account and changed the IP forwarding rules, and the DNS has propogated properly, so the site is back up and running.

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Getting Indexed First Makes A Big Difference

Rod — Wed, 28 May 2008 13:30:49 +0000

On Monday there was an incident of a naked man who stole a pair of coveralls and a 10-ton truck from a farm in Maple Ridge, BC, and led police on a 40 minute chase, with the man eventually abandoning the truck, and getting hit by an unmarked police SUV while trying to make a run for it. Local blogger Tyler wrote a simple post about it wondering what sort of traffic it might generate, as he’d had good luck with quickie posts like this before bringing in a lot of traffic.

The post quickly got picked up by Google, and for pretty much all of yesterday, his post, with a link to the video footage of the chase, was the top link for the search term “maple ridge truck chase”, beating out even the TV station that captured the whole thing on video.

Which just goes to show that in some cases, it’s definitely helpful to be the first one with a post on a topic. (Incidentally, he’s now dropped back to the #3 position for the same search term, with all results ahead of his being major news outlets, at least at the time of this writing. “Truck chase maple ridge” still has him in the #1 position).

This also goes to show that even variations on keyword terms can have a huge impact on SEO results, something to definitely think about.

During an MSN conversation with Tyler I got this:

April 26 2008: 68 visits
May 26 2008: 669 visits
Difference of 883.8% lol
That’s roughly 9 times the traffic.
I like how analytics tells me what phrases people use to get to my site:

maple ridge truck chase
maple ridge car chase
truck chase maple ridge
maple ridge chase
high speed chase maple ridge

So, as it’s quite simple to see, getting there first can sometimes make a big difference to the amount of traffic that comes to your site.

Pick those keywords carefully.

Wordpress Screencasts With Miss604

Rod — Mon, 26 May 2008 15:49:35 +0000

While she doesn’t blog specifically about blogging, Vancouver blogger Miss 604 has put out a few screencasts showing how it’s possible to make modifications to your Wordpress admin interface using both plug-ins and a little editing of your php files to hopefully make things a little easier when you’re writing your posts.

Being a Mac girl, she doesn’t use Windows Live Writer obviously, and although there are blog editing packages available for the Mac, she prefers using the admin interface in Wordpress itself.

I’ve posted about my frustrations with the Wordpress admin interface in the past, but have to admit that there are things I’d like to do in WLW that either aren’t possible, or that I haven’t found the right plug-in for yet, so I can have a bit of a tendency to flip-flop back and forth between the two interfaces if there’s something that specifically requires that I use the Wordpress interface.

Have a look at the screencasts, and also have a look at her whole Wordpress category. There’s definitely some good stuff in there.

Image courtesy of Miss 604 on Flickr.

BloggingNotes Now Supports OpenID

Rod — Wed, 21 May 2008 15:01:19 +0000

If you’ve never heard of OpenID you could be forgiven. However, the concept of what OpenID is used for is hardly new. It’s a universal login - similar to what the Microsoft Passport system was supposed to be like.

Now, assuming that you haven’t already clicked on the Back button, let me explain that OpenID is *not* Passport. First of all, it’s not a Microsoft product, it’s an open source project, with a large number of sites available to register your own OpenID.

One of the best things that you can do with OpenID, though, is to add a snippet of code to your website which will then allow you to use your URL as your OpenID. For example, my ‘official’ OpenID is rodtempleton.myopenid.com, but I’ve put the code into the header file here on BloggingNotes that will allow me to use the URL bloggingnotes.net as my login on any site that supports OpenID.

And BloggingNotes itself also supports OpenID, so if you’re going to leave a comment on a post, you can login with your own OpenID and if your OpenID provider provides a name and email, those values will be filled in automatically.

There are even directories of sites which already support OpenID which you should definitely check out.

The one problem that OpenID has, at this point at least, is a lack of widespread use. Until sites such as del.icio.us, Flickr, YouTube, Facebook, etc. get on-board, it’ll be a very useful, but still niche application. However, it doesn’t cost you anything to run it, and if it makes things a little easier for your readers, isn’t that worth taking the five minutes to set up the plug-in?

If you already use OpenID, you’re more than welcome to use it for commenting here. Hopefully you’ve found that the concept of a universal login is just what you’ve been looking for.

What Blogging Tools Do You Use?

Rod — Mon, 19 May 2008 13:30:30 +0000

I think that everyone has specific tools that they feel allow them to blog more effectively, and I’m interested in hearing what BloggingNotes readers use when they do their blogging.

While some of the tools that I use aren’t specifically related to blogging, they still allow me to be more productive whenever I’m writing. This will become more clear later in the post.

Windows Live Writer - I’m sorry, Wordpress. I’ve tried for the longest time to get into using the admin interface for writing posts, but I just can’t do it. If you’ve never tried using WLW, please do yourself a favour and download it. It’s worth it, and while there a lot more plugins than *useful* plugins, there are some real jewels available, which I’ll cover in my next post. Don’t let the fact that this is a Microsoft product dissuade you, either. This is something that Microsoft has done right. Very right.
del.icio.us - *the* bookmarking utility. I don’t even use the bookmarks feature in Firefox anymore. I can save any bookmarks that I need, and call them up from anywhere. Stuff that I think BloggingNotes readers would find interesting or helpful get tagged accordingly and appear under the http://del.icio.us/rtdn/blogging”>Blogging Bookmarks on del.icio.us heading in the sidebar. In fact, if there’s a link you think should be included, save it to your del.icio.us feed and tag it for:rtdn and then I’ll see it.
Flickr - I don’t post a whole lot of images here on BloggingNotes, but I certainly do on my other blogs, and the Add from Flickr plugin in WLW makes it easy to select photos for inclusion and resizing in my posts. I’ll be covering this one in a bit.
A blogging notebook - while this one isn’t always specifically a notebook, all bloggers should have a place to record ideas for current or future posts. I’ve used Moleskine notebooks, Google Docs, and my current choice is my Palm Zire. Whenever I get an idea for a post it gets written down and reviewed at least a couple of times per week. I might not have the details of a post worked out when I write it down, but getting rough ideas down will at least allow you to come back to them at some point when they might be more relevant.

And that’s about it for what I use. Nothing earth shattering for sure, but I’ve found that these tools allow me to be most effective in getting my blogging done.

But I’d really like to hear what BloggingNotes users are using to get their writing done. I’m almost certain that there’ll be something in there that I wind up trying and maybe even using for the long run.

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How Quickly Could You Recreate Your Blog?

Rod — Fri, 16 May 2008 14:30:12 +0000

You’ve spent a long time getting your blog to look just the way you want. But one day you decide that you want to change the theme. Or your wp-content folder gets corrupted. Or something else goes wrong, and for whatever reason, your blog is borked. Badly.

Well, Mark Krynsky has a suggestion in this post - keep a text file of all the customization that you make to your theme, in case you need to recreate it at some point. To quote from Mark’s post:

I’m pretty good about keeping a text file that identifies every customization I make to my theme along with details and the actual code. These items include content from third party services like Google Analytics, code necessary for plugins, scripts for widgets etc. I highly recommend you do this as it can be a nightmare trying to remember where all these pieces are without them being documented.

I don’t know why I haven’t thought of doing this before, but rest assured that I’m going to be working on it and will have documentation done for all of my blogs done in the next few days. It’s something that I should have done sooner, simply due to the fact that I have a tendency to change themes on a whim, and putting some of the stuff into the new theme sometimes gets overlooked in the rush to get the blog back up and running. Things like Google Analytics come to mind.

So if this isn’t something you’re currently doing, maybe it’s a habit you should look at getting in to. Particularly if you run multiple blogs, all on a single host.

Thanks for the suggestion, Mark.

Has Twitter Taken You Away From Blogging?

Rod — Wed, 14 May 2008 15:30:55 +0000

It doesn’t necessarily need to be Twitter - it could be Pownce, or Jaiku. Even FriendFeed could fit into the category. While some might claim that Twitter is a waste of time, I’m finding that I’m spending more time following it than I am following my RSS feeds. And I’m not the only one.

A lot of the people that I follow have a plug-in installed in their Wordpress setup that automatically sends a post to Twitter when a post goes live. Right now I have 220 followers on Twitter, and less than 50 RSS subscribers to BloggingNotes.

Finding out about new posts is just one of the benefits I’ve found from Twitter. A lot of times, breaking news stories will show up on Twitter before they’ll show up on blogs, simply because there’s no delay like there is in posting something to a blog and then having Feedburner pick it up and update your feed, sometimes hours later. Too slow for some cases.

Don’t get me wrong, though - I’m not saying that I prefer Twitter to blogging at all - Twitter is a maximum of 140 characters per post - an information burst. And the feedback and comments that I get from blogging are much more valuable in the long run if you ask me.

Use Twitter to complement your blogging - that’s its best feature. And if you follow enough people, rest assured that you’ll eventually get quite a few post ideas from it.

Which is always a good thing.

(If you would like to follow me on Twitter, visit http://twitter.com/rodtempleton)

How A Workflow Keeps You Blogging

Rod — Mon, 12 May 2008 14:30:19 +0000

It’s no secret that the time that I’ve spent posting here in the last little while has gone down considerably. Way back in November, I wrote a post detailing how a blogging workflow seemed to be keeping me on track and posting regularly. I’d like to revisit that post, and review how I’m following it

I’ve found that I haven’t been very diligent about keeping up with my blogging notebook, where I would write down ideas for new posts whenever they would come into my head, but now that I’m back to using a handheld device, things have been a little easier. If you don’t have a place to keep ideas for posts that might come up in the future, consider creating one. Maybe that post isn’t ready for writing at the moment, but the day will come when it’ll come in handy.

A regular posting schedule is something that you need to at least try to work in to your day. Quite a few bloggers have admitted to being surprised to find out just how much their readers depend on them to keep turning out posts. My initial posting rate on BloggingNotes was at least a post per day, but I can’t keep that pace up at this point in my life, so I think Monday, Wednesday and Friday is going to be it for the next little while.

Posting to your own blog first, especially if you’re trying to make money at it, is most important. Take care of the readers you already have first, and then go out and find blogs and forums to contribute to. This’ll help bring new readers in, but if you can’t keep the ones you currently have, bringing in new ones isn’t going to matter. You’ll be constantly chasing new readers, and not growing your readership at all.

Finally, have a look at sites outside of your niche. You never know where you’ll get the inspiration for a new post (or even a new blog). Just remember to write it down somewhere, or bookmark it. And if all you do is spend your time concentrating on a very narrow niche, yes, you’ll become an expert in that niche much more quickly, but you won’t have a wide range of experience to base anything on.

And that’s definitely not good.

Unrelated to the topic, but very related to the blog, there are some rather exciting plans in the very near future for BloggingNotes, which I can’t disclose at this time, but I’m hoping to have in place by the end of the month. When I’m ready to announce them, you’ll definitely find out about it here. (Or, you could submit guesses in the comments)

Don’t Force Users to Run Your Ads, Please

Rod — Thu, 01 May 2008 14:52:24 +0000

The other day I was on the hunt for a new theme for my personal site, due to the fact that I was going to use its installed theme (which I had paid for) on another blog.

I found one that I really liked and was able to tweak it enough to satisfy me. Then I got ready to modify the footer file in order to include the ads that run on the bottom of that blog, and I came across this:

“This file is protected by copyright, and any attempt to reverse engineer or decrypt the contents of this file is strictly prohibited.”

Following that was one heck of a long PHP string variable that just looked like gibberish. I went back to the site and found that there were already ads running on the bottom of the theme. So, I put my ad code underneath it all and checked again. They didn’t look like the ads that usually show up on that site, so I put the code above the original stuff and tried again. Same result.

The warning mentioned that I couldn’t reverse engineer or decrypt the file, but didn’t say anything about replacing it, so I stripped out all of the author’s stuff and inserted my ad code. Save, refresh, and have a look. There was something in that original code that affects the CSS, because now the page looks completely borked. Evidently the author is claiming that “you’re going to run my ads or you won’t use my theme”.

That’s fine. I won’t use your theme.

I can understand that some authors would like to be compensated for the work that they do on Wordpress themes, but I really think that a better option would have been to make a paid version of the theme and allowed the user to decide what they want to run on it. Seriously. I WOULD have paid for this theme. But now I don’t want anything to do with it.

I don’t mind if theme authors put a link to their own sites in the footer and then serve ads from that site, but if I’m going to use a theme, I get to configure it the way that I want, not the way the author says I have to.

BloggingNotes.net

100 Posts For Blogging Notes

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